You look in 1993 and see Guido Van Rossum and Berners-Lee arguing that instead of an IMG tag there should be a general “include”, that would allow you to pull together pieces of multiple sites together from multiple MIME types. Twenty years later, there’s still no include.

You see Shirky and Weinberger talking in 2003 about how the web was designed to connect pages, not people, and the groups forming were essentially hacks on top of that. But that power to connect people doesn’t get built into the protocols, or the browser, or HTML. It gets built on servers.

It’s almost like the web’s inability to connect people, places, and things was the ultimate carve-out for corporations. [I]f the connections have to live on a single server (or server cluster) then the company who controls that server wins.

The lack of an <include> tag led to Pinterest. No method to connect people created Facebook. RSS’s confusing interfaces contributed to Twitter’s success. Any guargantuan web company’s core value is a response to limitations of the protocol (connection), markup spec (description), or browsers (interface). Without proper connective tissue, consolidation becomes necessary to address these unmet needs. That, of course, leads to too much power in too few places. The door opens to potential exploitation, invasive surveillance, and a fragility that undermines the entire ethos of the internet.

[Edit: APIs were at first a patchwork to resolve the shortcomings of protocols. They let data flow from place to place, but ultimately APIs are an allowed opening to a private dataset—a privatized protocol. The halcyon days of Web 2.0 were a short lived window of benevolence that eventually closed.]

If a fifth of the planet signs on to Facebook each month, why shouldn’t a neutral version of it’s functionality be built into the protocol, markup spec, and browsers that drive the distributed web? (An argument could be made that Facebook is already trying to do the inverse—turning the internet into Facebook—with its internet.org campaign.) We should view the size and success of these companies as clear calls to recreate their products’ core functionality and weave it into the fabric of the web.

What if tech companies were field research for the protocol? This may be a dream, but it’s our only hope to refragment the web.

To answer your question, I haven’t much felt like it. I’ve been quiet, because there hasn’t been much to say, and I haven’t been looking for things to say. Of course, Twitter is a megaphone, so there is a small temptation to say something into it, even if it is just braying to hear your own voice loud, so…

Whenever I log in to Twitter, I think, “Where did all my friends go?” Now, my feed is mostly the strangers talking. That’s fine: my friends and I find other ways to keep in touch. Although, I do miss having that bizarre, constant contact a feed gives you. Maybe too intense. Maybe unhealthy. Not sure. Having a Twitter account with a decent number of followers is a high-maintainence relationship. I can’t blame my friends for clamming up. I remember last year catching myself: I was composing a tweet in my head while eating breakfast. I felt sick to my stomach and couldn’t finish. Since then, I’ve clammed up, too.

Have you heard of evaporative social cooling? It says the people who provide the most value to a social group or organization eventually burn out and leave, undermining the stability and progress of the group. Most of my internet friends have been on Twitter since 2008, so they probably fall into this group. How much more is there left to say?

We concede that there is some value to Twitter, but the social musing we did early on no longer fits. My feed (full of people I admire) is mostly just a loud, stupid, sad place. Basically: a mirror to the world we made that I don’t want to look into. The common way to refute my complaint is to say that I’m following the wrong people. I think I’m following the right people, I’m just seeing the worst side of them while they’re stuck in an inhospitable environment. It’s exasperating to be stuck in a stream.

Here’s the frustration: if you’ve been on Twitter a while, it’s changed out from under you. Christopher Alexander made a great diagram, a spectrum of privacy: street to sidewalk to porch to living room to bedroom. I think for many of us Twitter started as the porch—our space, our friends, with the occasional neighborhood passer-by. As the service grew and we gained followers, we slid across the spectrum of privacy into the street.

Of course, the things you say on your porch are much different than what you’d say on the street. But if the porch turned into the street without you noticing, there’d be a few painful months before you realized you needed to change how you spoke. I remember the first few times I was talking to friends (forgetting the conversation could be viewed by those who followed both of us), only to have strangers piggy-back on our grousing. It felt like a violation. But that’s on me for participating in a kinda-private, kinda-public conversation.

For the better part of a year, I’ve been trying to make Twitter feel like talking on the porch again, but it just can’t happen. Twitter isn’t talking for anyone with more than 500 followers—it’s publishing or advertising. We’re all on the street, and it’s noisy.

This may be overstating or overthinking the situation. Twitter is just a website. Yet, I can point to many opportunities, jobs, and (most importantly) friendships that sprung from it. Some married friends met on Twitter. It’s tempting to give an importance to the service for those of us who joined early and were able to reap these benefits, but that doesn’t mean Twitter needs to stick around forever. It matters. Or mattered. To me, I’m unsure which just yet.

The first time I met Chloe, she arrived at a party wearing a very opinionated, seering yellow raincoat. I had not seen that specific hue of yellow since my freshman year in college. Funny how a color can send you back so far.

It is seven years before the raincoat.

I am enrolled in a music appreciation class. One day, we are discussing songs in terms of colors. This is particularly interesting to another student, Anna, who just happens to be blind. Anna, being courageous, raises her hand and asks us to try to explain the specific yellow we were discussing, the yellow I’d see years later in Chloe’s raincoat. Another student raises his hand to attempt an answer. He stands up, walks over to Anna, and holds her hand.

“Can I do something now?” he says. Anna nods. “This is yellow.” And he slaps the back of Anna’s hand.

Chloe liked that story. I suppose it’s the closest I’ll ever get to understanding how she experienced the world.

Imagine your experiences come through a small aperture. Everything you hear, taste, read, touch, and—more than anything—feel, passes through that tiny hole to form your experience of this waking world. Now, take that pinhole and open it just a bit wider. A little wider still. And then, if you can, imagine what that does to your life. Everything you feel becomes sensational—highs are higher, lows are lower, the light—instead of just lighting—can now also burn. The incoming streams flood in and start to cross. There are now connections where otherwise there would be none. Songs point to seasons. Words taste like food.

That was Chloe. She was exceptional. I hate that “was” is not “is.”

It is now one year after the raincoat.

Chloe, like me, is from New York and left the east coast to live in Portland. I had just moved back east after a two year stint in Oregon, and I was having trouble adapting to the particular hardships of big city living that New York City so easily offers up in droves. She was in sympatico with me: happy with Portland and aware of its Neverlandish advantages, yet high-strung like a true east coaster, and thus slightly bored with the pace of the west coast. There was a longing for home and to be surrounded by those as quintessentially neurotic as you, yet also a fear of adjusting and suffering through all the bowls of shit New York serves up each day. It was a hot topic between us—it’d come up each time we saw one another.

I tend to ruminate on my troubles, and eventually, I can figure out how to frame my feelings to have them make sense. But this anxiety, this fear, was a sensation I couldn’t imagine how to describe. Then, finally, Chloe gave it to me, clear as day:

Portland is the island on Lost. You get there, magical things happen, and you are in disbelief. You make a go of living there. Things go exceedingly well for a while, but eventually you realize time is wonky, and you must escape. You work diligently to reconnect with the rest of the world. Eventually you leave the island and get back to where you were. Then, the everydayness of your own life sinks in, and you say to yourself, “We need to go back to the island!”

I needed Chloe to figure that out for me. I couldn’t do it, because my aperture wasn’t open enough. This wasn’t just a take on two cities—it was coming to grips with how to make yourself a home and how to be a person who lives there. It was wrestling with how to feel comfortable in your own skin.

It is three years after the raincoat.

I am with Chloe and Andy, her boyfriend and my friend friend. We are sitting in the lobby of The Merchant Hotel, ensconsed in an over-stuffed, Victorian sofa. The hotel is showy: high, vaulted ceilings, rococo-framed everything, oil-painted portraiture of the bourgeoisie you’d presume lived in the place, if you didn’t already know it used to be a bank. And there we were, cracking wise in the corner about crass subjects that shall not be mentioned here for the sake of preserving a bit of honor to this recollection. Chloe, for the first time all week, had a lightness about her. Her laugh is running up the wall, and bouncing off the ceiling. We are delighted. We are drunk in more ways than one.

A lot of Chloe’s rememberances have mentioned her smile. It’s true, it was a real stunner—wide and mischevious. She was so quick to offer it up. But I’m a man of rarer game—her laugh was always what I wanted, and it was just as special. She had a 100 watt smile and a 100 decibel laugh. That laugh is what I’ll miss the most.

My friend Chloe Weil died earlier this week. I won’t make a fuss in public. She wouldn’t have wanted that. Instead, I’ll sit and try to feel as much as I can—to open myself a little wider, let a little more light in, and have the current go a bit stronger. But, I must be careful. When the current is strong, a boat can go lost.

It is time to come clean: Github is confusing, Git is confusinger, pretty much everything in a modern web stack no longer makes sense to me, and no one explains it well, because they assume I know some fundamental piece of information that everyone takes for granted and no one documented, almost as if it were a secret that spread around to most everyone some time in 2012, yet I some how missed, because—you know—life was happening to me, so I’ve given up on trying to understand, even the parts where I try to comprehend what everyone else is working on that warrants that kind of complexity, and now I fear that this makes me irrelevant, so I nestle close to my story that my value is my “ideas” and capability to “make sense of things,” even though I can’t make sense of any of the above—but really, maybe I’m doing okay, since it’s all too much to know. Let the kids have it.

Communication in the city is so frought with bruskness, and words at work can be so soulless, so I’ve been searching for ways to eliminate pretense and increase warmth, all while ensuring good outcomes. Here are three I keep in my pocket. I hope they’re handy for you.